Salesmanship

I've always been an enfant sage and much abuse was hurled at me by more daring or excitable natures, what is really the same, because the reward determines the risks you take.

I'm also somewhat of an empath, which means that I have no difficulty telling, why someone does, what he does.

Salesmanship is of course the art to induce excitement over the product that is for sale and I've loathed it since the time I was trading toy cars as a child, because I had a favourite car and didn't tire to profess my love for it, until the neighbour's child wanted it so badly that he offered me a car ten times as valuable in return, which I accepted, though truly unhappily, and the next day his mother demanded that I give it back, which I refused to do out of principle, because a deal is a deal and I won't have my authority to make one contested by an adult.

So, a salesman's job is to create this drama day after day, which, in its ugliest incarnation, manifests itself in the form that Steppenwolf have sung about here:


Of special concern these days are however neither drugs nor toy cars, but visions of the future. When considering a course to take, there are always things speaking in its favour and things that speak against it, and the art of salesmanship hence boils down to explaining why the things that speak against it don't really speak against it.

There are two ways to achieve that, either you

1. dismiss the reasoning giving rise to the objection or you
   
2. allow the objection, but then make a distinction between what is usually proposed under the title it objects to and what you propose, in other words exploit the True Scotsman fallacy.
   

People, who have bought into the latter distinction are easy to spot, for they are starry eyed, and I've witnessed nationalism being sold like that at the next table in the local pub by a self professed Jewish girl to an Estonian boy at which scene I exploded with rage, which seemed to please the girl and shock the waitress, calling her a false Jew, but I'm not troubled by the outburst either.

Those outbursts were common until I vowed to stop them at the age of 12, and since I only fell twice into what can only be called holy wrath, the last time being when someone rammed my car while overtaking me and then tried to get away. Nothing ever comes of it, for the world is rotten to the core and will not be reminded of what it's inviting, but in those two cases I'm not ashamed to have let the light of righteousness shine anyway.

Well, but if you can do it, better than claiming that an objection has its merits, but simply doesn't apply to your solution, because your solution is special, is to make your objectors appear as unreasonable men, who simply lack your intellectual faculties, to which end you may want to talk fast and throw a lot of big words around, combined with allusions of how greatly you are doing and how badly they are.

You see, things can look quite alike, yet be entirely different things. When Russell Brand talked to Tucker Carlson, he sure talked fast and threw a lot of big words around, but it was a joke, a sportsmanlike demonstration of how fast and concise he is able to talk. On the other hand, when Elon Musk under his attention whoring pseudonym alluded to the theory of egoistic memes by saying that your thoughts shape your life and that that is something you have to consider when choosing between optimism and pessimism, all he really said is that human beings have a memory. But of course, if he had said that, the obvious conclusion would have been that it is the other way around, i.e. that the decision between optimism and pessimism is based on your experiences and not your experiences on it, or at least only in so far as an adaptation to your previous experiences influences your further experiences, which is a function of intelligence, i.e. to predict what is coming on the basis of what has come before.

All of this is completely trivial to me and you couldn't have fooled me with it in 1979 when I was 5 years old. Yet world politics is increasingly embracing these tactics, thinking that it's all just a question of pushing enough.